


Since I Must Choose

by TheDarkFlygon



Series: The Agenda [7]
Category: Caduceus | Trauma Center Series
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Family Issues, Friendship, Gen, LGBTQ Themes, POV Second Person, Song: Sans contrefaçon, Songfic, Trans Male Character, Transitioning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-26
Updated: 2020-02-26
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:01:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22912918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheDarkFlygon/pseuds/TheDarkFlygon
Summary: As you decide on specializing in a specific type of surgery, you go down memory lane to remember how you got to make your choice.
Relationships: Minor or Background Relationship(s), Tyler Chase & Derek Stiles
Series: The Agenda [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1628578
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	Since I Must Choose

**Author's Note:**

> _Dis maman, pourquoi je suis pas un garçon ?_  
>  As soon as I knew The Agenda would become a series, I knew I wanted to write a story based on the song "Sans contrefaçon" by Mylène Farmer. It's always spoken to me but it's only fairly recently that I guessed why I had this feeling. Sure, it's actually about crossdressing (thus the reference to the Chevalier d'Eon), but it hasn't stopped me from relating to its vibes anyway.  
> It's my artsy-fartsy way to say I've written a songfic in 2020 at the age of 21. I've kept the original lyrics in French inside of the story because 1. I just vibed to them that way 2. they're way too pretty to be translated. I've taken them very loosely for the meaning to, ngl.  
> The other driving idea behind this oneshot is also a fairly long one coming for The Agenda. I almost wrote it into another story before (I think i was Terrible Patients?), but ended up not going through with that idea in particular for it. I'm glad I could actually use a story to cement backstory things and what happens during Agenda!SO and Agenda!UTK2 (which is going to be a whooooole different story from what we got for U2K).

Your hand hovers over the empty box meant for a signature as, for the first time in a couple months, you hesitate to take the final decision. You’ve made your choice quite a long time ago; why are you freezing now? 

Well, you’re sure of your convictions, at least, aren’t you? If you need to convince yourself this is a major mistake, then perhaps you should run down memory lane to see in quick snapshots how you got to this decision. 

_Dis maman, pourquoi je suis pas un garçon ?_

Unlike what most people would assume, the condition you want to treat affects people as soon as they’re born. They aren’t exactly aware of it (well, who could be? You can barely do anything other than cry, drink and breathe so early on) yet, and sometimes the symptoms just take time to detect. It depends on the people: you can realize what’s wrong as soon as preschool starts or you can spend your entire life lying to yourself and powering through all the bad feelings it throws your way without even realizing it. 

You yourself didn’t quite realize until you were a teenager. Sure, you were called a tomboy and liked the moniker for what it brought you and brought to your image in the eyes of the other kids on the playground. Sure, you weren’t very much into dolls and preferred trying to keep up with the boys during recess, trying your hand (and sucking) at collective sports. Sure, you could fairly easily find a couple other bullet points to put on a list of early signs, but what point would that have? It’s always been easier to look over yourself after the fact. The current nature of the situation is what makes it so difficult to analyse.

In fact, you asked himself a couple times before why you “weren’t a boy”, why you were supposed to wear dresses and play with colourful ponies. You didn’t like being all pampered up for family reunions that’d just drag on and never wanted to see the rowdy cousins that preferred pulling on the pigtails Mom forced you to have rather than respect you as a legitimate console player. 

Dad’s passing didn’t help. Unlike him, Mom didn’t care if you weren’t considered fairly by the other children. She’d tell you that was how boys were: rowdy and hyperactive, easy to provoke, and that if you wanted calm you could just stay with the adults. Dad would have defended you and forced the boys to at least consider playing with you like they’d play amongst themselves; but once he was gone, he was gone for good, and that sense of security disappeared in one fell swoop.

Truth be told: at least, Mom was right on something: they did grow up from this mentality and became decent people. Too bad they never fully got the occasion or time to understand why their cousin “suddenly” switched names around.

_Puisqu’il faut choisir, à mots doux je peux le dire_

_Sans contrefaçon je suis un garçon_

You remember the day you finally realized what was wrong. You were in early high school, trying to fit with the other girls. As always, your interests started gravitating more towards the masculine side, even if you had given up on being any decent at sports by that point. You had even found yourself a boyfriend so you could understand what this whole dating thing was!

You can still remember Angie’s amusement when you told her about this fact sometime ago. She didn’t quite expect you to drop such a silly story during an especially calm and eerily silent night shift, sitting on the sofa in the on-call room with a nice cup of industrial coffee in hand. Still, her light-hearted giggle to your past embarrassment was more than worth it. 

Anyway. Dating this guy was awkward because you were already awkward about and with yourself. You didn’t like the idea of dressing nicely for a date with him, stared at the nail polish your friends suggested you to put on and the makeup you never liked to put onto your skin. In fact, you weren’t really attracted to him per say: you wanted to be like him, to look straight and sharp instead of all rounded in shapes. 

Of course, you ended up breaking up because you realized you were more into his ex than into him. There was just something about her silky hair, bright eyes and assertive demeanour you desired. You really just wanted to be him instead of his girlfriend. If you could, you’d have given your feminine attributes away, relished in the fact your shorter hair made people call you a guy from behind in corridors at times. You kept cutting it shorter and shorter despite your cut always looking like a shaggy bob cut after some time because your hair just grew back this quickly.

Then the Internet searches happened. You realized there were other people like you who didn’t quite know what or who they were. Girls that didn’t feel comfortable being so, guys who envied them, then the opposite way around… You were part of the first group. You envied the guys who were born with freedom from bathrooms, who had flat chests and wore tons of cologne to hide the smell of teenage, hormonal sweat.

Then it hit you on the head. You actually _were_ a guy. No lie, no faking: you were just born with the wrong chromosomes! That happened to everybody! You just happened to be lacking an Y chromosome like you should have been delivered. Storks made mistakes sometimes, but even then, maybe that was a bit difficult to explain to Mom. She didn’t look very excited about seeing her precious little daughter suddenly turn around and picking a name from one of Dad’s old comic books. Not that her opinion really mattered: as long as she gave you the authorization to go on hormones, you’d be good to go, right?

_Et pour un empire, je ne veux me dévêtir_

_Puisque sans contrefaçon je suis un garçon_

If starting a life-changing process had been strangely easy, it didn’t solve every little problem, far from it. High school wasn’t a very friendly environment for you and all the changes you were about to go through: the glares of the people who refused to understand, the confused glances of those who didn’t know but still saw the consequences of words you haphazardly put together in one night, the understand looks of those who were trying their best to empathize with a syndrome they didn’t understand… The ones whose puberty hadn’t turned into ravenous beasts but who still matched their soul’s sex. You wish you could have been one of them.

Instead, you never wanted to undress in the lockers. You didn’t want to show what forcefully kept your chest flat and the sports bra you were forced to put on for sport classes. Your body was betraying you every single time you took off something, will it be bottom or top, paralyzing you into permanent celibacy. You just couldn’t bring yourself to be intimate with someone.

_Tout seul dans mon placard, les yeux cernés de noir_

_À l’abri des regards, je défie le hasard_

As such, you weren’t the most social animal in high school, loneliness plaguing your daily life. You earned for friends who’d be more understanding, for friends who couldn’t see through the physical changes brought onto you by the hormones your brain had so desperately craved without ever telling you clearly. You may have gained some muscle, body hair and started a second puberty altogether, your comrades still remember you as someone who wore ponytails in freshman year and tried dating a guy. 

You wished someone would have understood your pain or, even better, that they could have actually provided help. That they could have freed you from the prison you unwillingly put over your entire self. Sure, you had your psychiatrist and endocrinologist, but they only provided mere physical and psychological sources of relief. They couldn’t rid of your disgust for your own flesh. They just couldn’t, it was outside anyone’s powers.

_Dans ce monde qui n’a ni queue ni tête, je n’en fais qu’à ma tête_

_Un mouchoir au creux du pantalon, je suis chevalier d’Éon_

Nonetheless, high school eventually came to a close and you graduated just fine. Followed your dreams, entered med school, met new people who had never seen you before. You wanted to save people like your father who died to an unfair illness and help people like you get through the journey to the end of dysphoria. 

But now, things were much different. You were in a field where you felt entirely concerned and where nobody knew about a “previous life”. Name changed, ID card changed, body changed: you weren’t the person you had been in high school. You felt more confidence in this despite the fear of not wearing a chest plate or being busted always hovering over your head like a sword of Damocles. You were, simply put, finally in control of your life, and man did it feel good to be so.

_Puisqu’il faut choisir, à mots doux je peux le dire_

_Sans contrefaçon je suis un garçon_

_Et pour un empire, je ne veux me dévêtir_

_Puisque sans contrefaçon je suis un garçon_

You still had reserves, but the more med school went on and the more you almost failed your exams, the better life got. Tyler was now entirely by your side, providing you with answers to questions you could never remember for your own sake and support you’d have never imagined ever getting. Despite the appearances and how much he likes poking fun at you for all your little flaws, he’s shockingly non-judgmental of the biggest of your insecurities, the one you simply never show.

He had all the rights to call you out on your massive lies and secretive attitude, yet he didn’t. After all, he did point it out only after you showed yourself being breathless multiple times and he had noticed the weirder things in your dorm room. Not exactly everyone has a syringe on display in their unorganized personal space that isn’t for drugs. At least, he didn’t have to explain this very odd occurrence, so that was a positive already. He never asked you if you were sure “of your choice” or if you weren’t just a very butch lesbian, he just told you not to bind for more than eight hours at a time. Tyler is just the best and you weren’t sure if you deserved him.

_Tour à tour on me chasse de vos fréquentations_

_Je n’admets qu’on menace mes résolutions_

And it was a good thing that Tyler, then the staff of Hope Hospital were either accepting or simply ignorant of what was really going on. Your family started to drift apart massively: Mom called less and less (to be fair, she hadn’t been a massive caller when you first began either), stopping to call you entirely after your residency started “because you could finally fend for yourself, now”. The aunts and uncles never got to know about your real self after your grandparents received the news very poorly, thanks to Mom being awful at explaining what it was really all about.

You didn’t find yourself missing them all this much, though. You got called a fraud multiple times, repeatedly got told it was just a phase, and even your own remaining parent wasn’t too kind to you. The only family you had truly left was the loving memory of your late father and Tyler, your brother-like best friend. You both eventually drafted apart from each other after residency started, but you promised to the other you’d meet again… and it didn’t fail to happen despite the half-lost hopes.

_Je me fous bien des « qu’en-dira-t-on ? », je suis caméléon_

_Prenez garde à mes soldats de plomb, c’est eux qui vous tueront_

After all, how dared you focus on yourself? You should have considered their hardships having to change the way they referred to you, instead of being so selfish and only thinking about your crippling existential dread moments and paralyzing moments of dissociation. You should be smiling and happy to see your kin! To see all these people who have supported you since your birth (not really, but you know, Mom just really loves complimenting qualities that aren’t there as long as it’s about _her_ side of the family. You can criticize Dad’s all you want, though, even if they at least call you by the right name despite the massive, messy misunderstanding that’s still going on to this day with your paternal grandparents).

How dared you dislike having to see people that held you to such low standards, who looked down on you like you were a circus freak? Maybe you were a monster, after all, considering the unnatural scars that blossomed on your chest (obviously, they only asked about “where your chest had gone” and never if you had needed help, you had had to rely on Tyler and your extended social group for care); but then, why did nobody have the guts to tell you? Mom was quick to slap you for blaming yourself on Tammy’s death, yet failed to tell her son he was a biological failure.

You’re not a fraud, you know that now; but, back in the day, it was difficult to tear yourself away from such a rotten label. Surely other people are still going through this, older and younger than you are at the moment, and you shouldn’t let your talents go to waste if you can help these people too.

You finally fill in the first signature out of three that you need.

_Puisqu'il faut choisir, à mots doux je peux le dire_

_Sans contrefaçon je suis un garçon_

_Et pour un empire, je ne veux me dévêtir_

_Puisque sans contrefaçon je suis un garçon_

Since then, the confessions have continued pouring, all of them reminding you that you really, weren’t a fraud, starting with Angie. You had to explain to her what was going on because she had seen the crescent-shaped war scars. She only stared at you with confused, pained or saddened glances, before you picked up her hand and told her it was fine, that you trusted her with your life. This secret is part of it, obviously, as much as you want to bury it.

You discussed it with Naomi because she had seen your medical record before even seeing the manifestation of it. She wasn’t judgemental, merely factual, but you could spot the melancholy in her eyes and feel the regret in her voice as she told you she had also guessed one of her former workmates, perhaps the only man she cared about in Delphi (if not in America before Angie and you barged into Caduceus Europe), was in the same case as you. You should help people like this faceless, nameless man out too.

You sign the second paper sheet. This one is going to Sidney, so you better make it clean and proper if he doesn’t get back at you. Not that your director would ever judge you harshly on the choice, at least not according to his own brother and quite literally all of your experience working under his wise, well-meaning direction. If someone is to accept your wish to specialize yourself in a certain field while remaining at the cutting-edge Caduceus, it’d be him.

He may know about it already, but honestly, you don’t feel as ashamed or as endangered as before about people discovering this fact. It’s a part of who are, after all, and it’s time you stop running away from it like a cowardly dog. You should take a stand and help people in your case, stop hiding yourself as it’s only hurt you in the longer run. Just make sure the persons you tell are some you can trust in, that’s all…

_Puisqu'’l faut choisir, à mots doux je peux le dire_

_Sans contrefaçon je suis un garçon_

_Et pour un empire, je ne veux me dévêtir_

_Puisque sans contrefaçon je suis un garçon_

Maybe your mentor has told him already, after all. Still, you shouldn’t assume that from the great Dr Kasal: he’s been very careful around the topic. He may have been forced to tear you away from a painful conversation with a striking, almost piercing question that reminded you for a second of how awful your teenage years were to you. Nonetheless, he didn’t go after Naomi for illegally easing your medical situation to your perhaps damaged psyche. He made sure to tell you that you were nothing but yourself, not some kind of counterfeit like you were raised to believe. He’s the father you lost years ago and you still haven’t told him that even after he almost died from GUILT and even after he saved you again, discovering the truth by another scar.

It’s likely that Cybil knows too but, like her husband, she’s as silent as stone unless you’re the one speaking about it. They both respect your privacy and elemental rights to give a potential weapon to whomever isn’t you or the medical staff you need to see from time to time. Caduceus is aware of it by now, you’re sure of it, but they never bring it up. It’s a comforting atmosphere where you feel like you’re free to tell them or not, that there is no urge to confess to it or that’d it even be a confession. Honestly, you could just casually bring it up and it’d be no big deal.

_Puisqu’il faut choisir, à mots doux je peux le dire_

_Sans contrefaçon je suis un garçon_

_Et pour un empire, je ne veux me dévêtir_

_Puisque sans contrefaçon je suis un garçon_

You don’t know who needs to hear this idea or who needs help to understand it, to go beyond what they may have been told before by people who were supposed to accept them as they came. You don’t know who needs one of the few miracles you’ve seen in your life, so you should just go ahead and make it available. Plus, considering this is Caduceus, you’ll be able to make research progress in that field and help even more lives this way. If this isn’t why you accepted to join Caduceus, aside from making your mentor proud and fight an epidemic, then why have you taken that decision, huh?

You check if Angie’s signature is present on the three documents, as she’s accepted to be your main assistant and go through the learning curve with you, then put in your last signature. This copy is for you to keep, so you better treasure it: it’s about to change a part of your life, it’s very much worth keeping in a safe.

You know, if there is one field your experience can help with, it’s with the very specific subset of surgeries you’ve gone through yourself. You can’t let this go to waste, not when it’s so needed.

**Author's Note:**

> I figure I should provide a translation of the song lyrics featured there. I didn't have the heart to translate them inside the story because they're well too well-crafted for me to give them proper justice. This translation is only worth something for its meaning.
> 
>  _Without Counterfeiting_  
>  "Tell me Mom, why am I not a boy?
> 
> (Chorus)  
> Since I need to choose, in soft words I can say it,  
> Without counterfeiting, I am a boy,  
> And for an empire, I don't want to take off my clothes,  
> Since, without counterfeiting, I am a boy.
> 
> Alone in my closet, black all around my eyes,  
> Safe from stares, I defy odds,  
> In this world that has neither head nor tail, I just do what I want,  
> A handkerchief in my pants' pocket, I am Chevalier d'Eon.
> 
> (Chorus)
> 
> Turn by turn, I'm chased away from your company,  
> I won't admit my resolutions to be threatened,  
> I don't care about "what would they say?"'s, I'm a cameleon,  
> Watch out for my lead soldiers, they're the ones who'll kill you.
> 
> (Chorus x6)"


End file.
